Intellectual Property Rights and the Politics of Food - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 386

Internationally ITPGR is the only treaty that has resulted in some form of benefit
sharing for farmers, but its scope and funding are limited. An important question is
how to harmonize intellectual property laws with farmers' rights and the right to food.
Haugen (2014) points out that states can adopt a number of measures on public health
and nutrition in such a way that they are compatible with TRIPS and still promote ben-
efit sharing and provide exceptions in provisions relating to intellectual property rights.
It has been suggested that ITPGR is not sufficient to realize farmers' rights internation-
ally and that a global coalition of stakeholders should take efforts to alter the situation
(Winter 2010).
Commitment to farmers' rights is often reduced to providing a few exemptions
and rights over seed use rather than a comprehensive approach that recognizes farm-
ers as innovators and promotes their involvement in participatory plant breeding.
Agreements have also failed to create a policy space that promotes farmers' empower-
ment. The absence of an international treaty and the weak provisions in ITPGR ensured
that while farmers' rights are widely discussed, little is done to promote and protect
them. The irony is that while the rights of plant breeders and the private seed industry
are well protected, the rights of farmers and farming communities who have nurtured
diversity in plant genetic resources, developed countless varieties of crops with different
traits, and contributed to exchange and conservation of plant genetic resources are left
to the discretion of the states without any binding global commitment.
Plant Variety Protection and
Intellectual Property Rights
Plant varieties and seeds were once considered outside the purview of the industrial
mode of production. They were considered to be products of nature and, hence, not eli-
gible for intellectual property protection.8 Farmers had all the rights over seeds, includ-
ing the right to reuse, sale, and exchange; today the very right of farmers to save seeds
and reuse them is under dispute. Traditionally, plants could be multiplied and a handful
of seeds were enough to (re)create plantations or fields filled with plants. This reproduc-
ibility is a feature that resisted commodification through the grant of intellectual prop-
erty rights on germplasm/plant genetic resources. Colonial expansion, the transfer of
exotic germplasm, and the introduction of new crops and varieties in distant lands went
hand in hand. Colonial expansion also resulted in establishing botanical gardens in
many places and the use of germplasm brought from elsewhere for varietal development
or for use as new crops. The biological limitation of reproducibility was overcome by
both scientific discoveries and legal regimes that gave intellectual property rights over
seeds and plant varieties.
With the rediscovery of Mendel's work in genetics in the first decades of the twenti-
eth century, plant breeders acquired a better understanding of the transmission of traits